Interview By Brian Baker

Fred Eaglesmith

Fred Eaglesmith's résumé is full of fascinating plot points, but his humble and harsh beginning in life is perhaps the most compelling. One of nine children born to farming parents in Ontario, Canada, Eaglesmith was forced to hard work early in life at the age of 13, when his father lost the family farm and took work in a nearby town while the children helped with the grueling home chores. When Eaglesmith is reminded of the similarities between farmers and musicians -- great effort often rewarded by great indifference, due to uncontrollable external factors -- Eaglesmith laughs at the analogy and offers his own perspective.

"The thing is that you can be a mediocre musician, and if you work real hard, you can do real well," Eaglesmith says from the Charlotte, N.C., stop on the first leg of his latest Fifty Odd Dollars tour. "As a matter of fact, some of them are really bad, and they've done really well. It gives you a lot of hope."

Since the June '99 release of Fifty Odd Dollars, Eaglesmith's third U.S. album, he's been touring relentlessly, perhaps a by-product of his deeply ingrained farming work ethic. This next circuit will take him around America again, with some possible European dates down the line, and then Eaglesmith plans a little uncharacteristic downtime. With the pace he's kept lately, he's had precious little time to write new material, but he's learned over the years the right way to go about presenting the fresh stuff to his audience.

"I've got some brand new stuff, but not that much yet," he says. "The record's not that old. The thing is not to bring too much out. I used to bring it all out right away, and then I'd get into huge trouble because it wasn't on the album. And then I'd put out a new record, and one of the songs wouldn't be on it, and I'd be in worse trouble."

Although only a few of the new songs have actually made it to the finished stage, Eaglesmith has his next album mapped out in his head. His current plan is to finish this next phase of touring and then take some time off the road to frame up the next album, which at this point is shaping up into a Country album, something he's always wanted to do, and begin the recording process, possibly as early as this spring.

His patience is obvious and well documented. He's recorded a half dozen albums in Canada since 1980, including two live albums, and eventually scored a Juno award for his seventh, 1995's Drive-In Movie, which also marked his debut in America. (Oddly enough, Drive-In Movie came out in the U.S. first, through his Nashville publisher, and then was released in Canada.) He's enjoyed a great deal of cultish success at home, so the wide critical acclaim that greeted Drive-In Movie and its follow-up Lipstick Lies and Gasoline, his first for indie label Razor & Tie, has been very satisfying. When the time came for Eaglesmith to begin work on Fifty Odd Dollars, he was ready to try something a little different, even though his new direction could have been potentially confusing to some of his new fans.

"I wrote a lot of Fifty between Lipstick Lies and when I made the new record, and some of it I was actually finishing in the studio, which I've never really done before," Eaglesmith recalls. "Once I got the concept down for the record, I realized I didn't have all the material. Or that I had a lot of halves, a lot of stuff that wasn't finished. A lot of this was written on the fly, which gives the album that antsy feeling. It's not quite as settled down as Lipstick. Everything's a little shaky on the record, which I kind of like. The thing with me is that I really wait for albums to settle down about two or three years later, and then I can have a good look and see what I did. I'm getting perspective on Fifty right now. I think this was a good thing for me, because a lot of my work in the past has been very bland, very settled in. Jimi Hendrix said that a song's only as good as the present air, and everybody's real jittery right now. Maybe that's it."

2000 is shaping up to be a jittery time for Eaglesmith, even with his reduced road duties. In addition to the preliminary work on his next album, he also has plans in the works to release some of his existing Canadian back catalog here in the U.S., details of which will be found on his Web site (www.eaglesmith.com) as soon as a deal can be put together. Eaglesmith is also moving slowly into the potentially lucrative market of offering his songs for films, with a couple of small foreign and indie films having already used his work on their soundtracks. (It's indicative of the speed at which Eaglesmith has been operating for the past couple of years that he can't remember the names of the movies in which his music has appeared.) He's planning a visit to this year's Sundance Festival in an effort to drum up even more interest, although there seems to be plenty of filmmakers lining up in his camp already.

Of course, Eaglesmith's most immediate concern is the continuing success of the extremely well received Fifty Odd Dollars. The album made appearances on a number of Top 10 lists at the end of last year, a fact that makes him deservedly proud. As much as Fred Eaglesmith hopes to achieve in his career, it's clear mass acceptance and staggering unit sales are the farthest thing from his mind when he considers his place in the food chain of the music industry.

"The cool thing is that, even though the album isn't huge, I have a good life," he says with confidence. "I'm not starving. I'm doing pretty good. Another thing that happens with my albums, and it's happened to me all my life, is that three or four years later, people are onto them. I've made three albums in the last four years. There are quite a few people onto them, and a lot more who aren't, but you just wait and every day it gets bigger and better. I always tell my record company, or anybody else, that it's just time. Whether you have it or not doesn't matter to me. I do."

E-mail Brian Baker

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